


Concentricity

by LowDawn (EmpiricalBias)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Inception AU, implied sympharah, more tags as updates follow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 16:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10442646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpiricalBias/pseuds/LowDawn
Summary: “I’m an orchestrator, not a point man,” he’d said to someone at some point before all of this.





	

Something feels _off,_ from the very beginning.

Maybe it’s the way the light hits his eyes, the angle of the sun in a false cityscape that doesn’t prescribe to physics anyhow. But there’s more at stake here than he’d like to risk on acting on just a feeling; so while he knows better than to outright ignore it (a fatal mistake, especially in this line of work), Lúcio only shakes his head when Gabe looks his way. They can both chalk it up to their nerves.

For now.

The level one dream is Numbani, an art museum. Formal wear and flashing shutters, plenty of leeway for the team to blend into an international guest list of a grand exhibition opening. Fareeha catches his eye at the entrance and winks, dressed in a security uniform; Lúcio beelines to the banquet table as soon as she waves him through, meeting eyes and shaking hands on the way to pouring himself a glass of carbonated punch.

Her recreation of the ultramodern aesthetic, the slight Japanese sensibilities snuck into the decor, is flawless - all exactly the way Satya had wanted, except in the gallery pieces themselves, where an impatience for the non-figurative is obvious. An assortment of 19th-century paintings line the far corridors (among them, a collection of Shiundus: abstract, but never _fully_ abstract), at thematic odds with the intercultural collaborative on the main floor. Necessary compromise. But it doesn’t matter; won’t matter, soon enough.

Lúcio spies Jesse loitering near a different exit, and then Gabriel by the deadeye's line of sight; the slow roll of the extractor’s shoulders as he steps into the fray is a familiar one. His target is obvious: the businessman in the center of the room, standing in his immaculately tailored suit with a thousand-yard stare. He doesn’t notice Gabe approaching until he’s being addressed.

When the mark turns, tilting his head with the air of a rich man, Lúcio tips his glass back to drain it. He already knows what that face looks like.

Shimada Hanzo.

They need to draw out his unease. Make him uncomfortable. Their client wants them to uncover a secret - but without knowing what the secret _is,_  all they can really do is coax the mark along until he leads them to it himself. There isn’t even a guarantee that what they find will be what the client expects, though that’s what binding legal (illegal) contracts, some personally compelling blackmail from both sides, and a forward sum of enough to get Gabe off the radar of at least _one_ of the international agencies after him, are for.

Lúcio is clear of the blackmail, thanks to a friend. Said friend is also the reason he’s here, sipping punch in a beautifully reconstructed example of contemporary West African architecture and lending a wanted man his help in what’s going to be the most challenging dive any member of this team has ever attempted.

Across the floor, the mark shakes Gabe's offered hand. Lúcio watches them - both of them, Shimada’s stiff-spined smile and the effortlessly relaxed friendliness on Reyes's face as he chats him up - and considers that he’s always liked working toward a good cause.

When this is over, Gabriel Reyes will sleep much easier.

(And so will he, once he gets that dossier on the Shimadagumi. The sudden influx of PASIV-grade tranquilizers on the Brazilian black market had to have come from somewhere.)

As they expected: Shimada turns on his heel within ten minutes, distrustful and impeccably polite to a fault. Gabriel keeps him engaged as long as he can, but soon enough he’s alone to contemplate the installation before him (a wall tapestry, enormous, mixed fabrics and patterns from two different continents intermeshed).  

The smile drops off his visage in Shimada’s absence. His shoulders are still drawn back, old habits loath to leave, but when he sighs and scrubs a hand over his goatee the action ages him decades in an instant. A somber cobweb of years, drawn into the fine lines around his mouth and eyes.

Lúcio refills his glass.

A minute later he walks briskly out of a service exit alone. (“I’m an orchestrator, not a point man,” he’d said to someone at some point before all of this.) He crosses the street, checking the time on his watch. Once on the other side he goes twenty steps down the sidewalk before turning, stopping in a little alleyway to tap a cigarette loose from the box he pulls from his pocket.

“No light,” he sighs, patting himself down.

The unlit smoke is plucked from his lips. Back the way Lúcio came, the holo-banners adorning the museum flicker rapidly. “Not for you,” Sombra smirks, as a power surge takes out the entire block. The augmentations she’d taken on in reality to do what she can in the dreamscape really _shine_ in moments like these. “I thought you quit?”

“Maybe in your dreams,” he grins. She scoffs, and hands the cigarette back. 

Shimada will be caught in the evacuating crowd. Fareeha will be there to confirm the moment his own security team fetches him from the venue - the likelihood at least _some_ of his mental defenses will take the guise of yakuza is nearly 100%. The team will be prepared. Reyes will follow Jesse out his exit, Satya will get an alert the same moment Fareeha sends him one, and then—

“Company.” Sombra nods at the ink black car that pulls up just to the side of the museum entrance. Lúcio peers over her shoulder to look at her little hexagonal screen, taking in the top-down view of the street and the two suited figures that exit the vehicle. She splays her fingers through the air and another half dozen screens bloom before his eyes, each honing in on separate individuals and clusters of people scattered across the hot zone.

Shimada’s subconsciousness, scenting their intrusion already.

Sombra tuts. “That’s a lot of suspicious guys. Figures,” she grumbles, “his brain’s just as paranoid asleep as it is awake _._ ”

“Ha,” Lúcio remarks absently, more focused on raking his gaze over the array. He flashes her a smile. “I was right, though. Just wait until we hit level three - that’s when the _real_ party begins.”

His companion makes a noise of disgust, dismissing the surveillance grid with a wave. “Too bad I won’t be there to crash it.” She waits with a hand on her hip, grin curling catlike when Lúcio looks up from checking his watch again. “Shall we?”

Power returns to the main street in parts, but by now it’d be too late for the museum to salvage the event, if the museum were real. It's still too bad; Fareeha had spent so much time on it. His phone pings with a message recieved and not more than a moment later he and Sombra look, together toward the narrow opening where the mouth of the alley meets the road, and see a black car appear briefly as it flies past.

Sombra makes a little _after-you_ gesture. “Tu orquesta te espera.”

He laughs, falling into step beside her. "Not that old joke again."

In dreams, time flows relative to the consciousness - or consciousness _es,_ in this case. A feature he likes to take advantage of: the two of them make it to their destination and secure it well ahead of time, but waiting for the others makes anticipation speed their arrival. The convenience alone is worth the effort it takes to work that oddity into his plans every now and then, even if the inherent irregularity makes it maddeningly difficult to predict well.

It’s a grey van that finally rolls into sight, heavily tinted windows gleaming opaque.

“They’re here,” Sombra announces. No need for complicated identity checks when a master hacker is on the scene. Lúcio hops to his feet as the car veers smoothly into the open warehouse. The segmented garage door shutters behind it, sealing them all inside.

He skirts around and lets himself into the front passenger seat. Inside, the bass notes of his favorite mix still undulate from the audio system, the reverbs vibrating down his spine even as he reaches across faux leather to turn down the volume. A glance into the back catches Jesse stifling a yawn, sitting on the other side of Fareeha and Satya. Between them: one roughed-up, deeply asleep Shimada Hanzo.

Sombra raps twice on the body of the vehicle on the other side, standing back when the driver’s door swings open. “Had a nice trip?” she quips, at Gabriel's raised eyebrows.

“Clock’s ticking.” He drops the keys into her waiting hand. “Twenty minutes. Think you can handle it?”

She palms it. Tosses it into the air. It glints silver on the way up, then flashes like anodized titanium falling down. The van ripples from front to back as it takes on the same shade of violet. “Who do you think I am?” she scoffs.

“Didja have to do that while I was looking at it?” one disgruntled Jesse McCree asks, half-in half-out the sliding van door on Gabe's side. He regards the new paint with a full-bodied grimace. “And to that color?”

“It won’t look like that the whole time,” Sombra rolls her eyes, “but I’m open to suggestions. Anything you pick will have the fashion police _flocking_ to it. Perfect decoy.”

The hand that Jesse cups to the side of his head is deliberate. So is the finger he puts up as a sign to _wait_ before he fishes the foam plugs out of his ears. “What was that?" He drawls. "Aw, I’m sorry, I couldn't hear you over the  _deafening irony_.”

Sombra crosses her arms over her open-collared, asymmetrical coat, head tilted just so to keep a cascade of purple-ombre hair out of her eyes. By virtue of her profession, she’s the only one that can get away with looking so out of place. “You want to say that again, vaquero?”

Lúcio shuts the passenger door after unplugging and retrieving his audio player. He doesn’t bother hiding his amusement, raising his brows to meet the deadpan exasperation in Gabe's eyes as the taller man walks past, and the other two stop their bickering to pin him with identically offended looks when he fails to smother his quiet laughter. He raises his hands in immediate surrender, still grinning.

Sombra tsks, but not unaffectionately, before turning to follow the extractor. 

Jesse only grunts. Then he grunts again when he’s lightly pushed from inside the van.

“Out,” orders a voice.

“Workin’ on it,” he replies, flexing his jaw to clear his ear canals. “Lúcio's damn tune worked so well I almost forgot we're all already asleep. Ten seconds in,”—he snaps his fingers— “out like a light. Fastest lullaby I barely even heard.”

“If you play the same song up top, even for a little bit,” Lúcio grins, pointing up with a finger, “the brain remembers. Overlap gives it more _oomph_ once you’re under.” He accepts the clap to his shoulder with an exaggerated wince, then hurries to support Jesse’s weight when it falls too heavily on his second step. “Hey, you alright?”

“Gunshot wound,” Satya informs him, finally able to exit the van with Jesse out of the way. Lúcio glances behind her, where Fareeha is checking Shimada’s restraints. His attention is dragged back when Jesse winces; Satya is pulling the lapel of his jacket aside, noting, “It’s good the bullets went all the way through. There was no time to dress it properly on the way, but I shall see to it now that we’ve arrived. I assume this place is adequately secured?”

“Uh, yeah?” Lúcio replies, mildly affronted at the implication it wouldn’t be. “‘Course it is.”

She pauses, her gaze flickering over him, then frowns. “I was merely asking to confirm,” she sniffs, unappreciative.

He makes his doubt plainer in his words this time: "I really don't believe you."

"That does not surprise me."

Jesse sighs with the weight of every one of his thirty-seven years behind it. “Terrible bedside manner, both of you,” he says, looking pointedly at the bloodstain leaching slowly through the scuffed white fabric of his shirt. “I’ll be fine. Bastard and his friends put up a fight, that’s all.”

“You’ll have to fight him again if you wake him up with all your yapping,” Fareeha snipes, hefting Shimada out of the van. Satya leaves Jesse to Lúcio, directing all of them to the cots set up in the corner. Fareeha’s palm hits the broad of Jesse’s back as she goes by, eliciting a pained wheeze; she moves no slower for the dead weight of an unconscious man over her shoulders. “Try to keep up, Jesse.”

“Why are all of you always so mean to me,” Jesse complains, shuffling along.

Lúcio doesn't mention how, from the angle his height and being pressed to his side allow him, he can see the tendons of Jesse's neck jump whenever he clenches his jaw. Instead he cracks a joke about sharpshooters that gets the other man to groan with a smile instead of a wince, and eases him slowly down on one of the low mattresses. Satya returns to render aid, Fareeha close behind. Lúcio moves back to give them space to work, running the situation through his mind with a detached sense of alarm. The first real wrench, thrown: there’s no way they can leave Jesse behind. He's their anchor in level two. “Sorry, man. I’d play you Rejuvenescência, but…”

“Overlap, I know.”

Sombra comes back from standing watch near the warehouse's only window, conveniently placed to offer a very good line-of-sight down two ways to the corner of one street and a good ways up the other, and hands Jesse a biotic gelpack conjured from thin air. Gabriel's lips thin at the sight, but ultimately he says nothing of the additional risk, and Lúcio returns the nod he’s given as he helps him reel out the lines from the PASIV.

They’ll have to improvise. The gelpack won’t fix him, but it’ll help Jesse focus past the pain. Lúcio straightens, mentally editing the game plan: he'll take over what parts he can handle from Jesse’s role in the level two dream, then. And Gabriel can cover the rest.

He shares a look with Gabe, who appears to have come to the same conclusion.

“I’ll go with Satya,” Lúcio announces. A moment later he feels compelled to add, “Look, I’m not all that excited about this either.”

The pinched expression on Satya’s face doesn’t change, but she agrees. “Fine."

Reyes gives both of them pointed looks. “Good," he says, with finality. Then, "Jesse?”

Jesse salutes one-handed from where he’s laying, without looking or sitting up. “I hear ya.” When Lúcio presses a line into his hand, he takes it. "Much obliged."

Lúcio takes an extra moment to knock his knuckles against his, reassuringly. The biogel Fareeha slathers over Jesse's side (two bullet holes, both clean) is a sheer and inorganic neon yellow, smelling like a distinctly sterile nothingness that's probably blamable on the nanobots. Lúcio watches the injuries disappear gradually, first under gauze and last a long hashtag formation of medical tape, the toe of his fancy shoes tapping an insistent rhythm against the ground.

He’s used to things going the way he expects. He's even more used to finding solutions when things don't. The stumbling block they’ve hit isn’t insignificant but it shouldn’t _feel_ like this, shouldn't suggest at all the looming, ominous air that it does. It could simply be a detail he'd missed early on, but the idea of such a simple mistake being the root of all of this strikes him as—

_Too easy._

The glare of the warehouse lights bleeds into his vision. Abruptly, Lúcio finds himself reminded of the _feeling_ that had caught at him before. 

He knows better than to ignore it a second time.

As he settles down on the remaining cot he draws his locs over his shoulder, out of Satya’s way as she arranges herself beside him. In the corner of his vision he sees Fareeha reach down to push a stray hair gently out of the other woman’s face.

He rolls over. Sombra catches his gaze. She's leaning against the van, finger hooked into the center of a keyring. The single key attached spins around and around - trapped in an endless loop, until she catches it in her fist.

“Be careful out there,” she warns.

“You know it,” he returns.

The hollow needle when he takes it to his skin slides in near-painlessly; Gabriel helps Jesse with his, then props himself up against the foot of his cot. Sombra bids them goodbye with a waggle of her fingers as Fareeha kneels over the PASIV and checks all of them in turn, counting heads until she arrives at the final passenger, their unconscious mark.

“Back into the fray,” she nods, depressing the button to inject.

**Author's Note:**

> edit 5/17/17 - changed all the times Lúcio addresses Reyes to a less formal alternative


End file.
